TWEETS

Making The Most of Dreamforce 2016!

By Steve Connolly | September 22, 2016

There are fewer B2B conferences as valuable or as intimidating as Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce conference, held this year from October 4th through the 7th in downtown San Francisco. Intimidating? Why would a conference be intimidating? Well, perhaps not for the seasoned Salesforce pro, but for most attendees, the significant volume of events can be daunting. For most people, Dreamforce breaks down into three main areas of focus:

Salesforce Sessions & Training– these are sessions designed to help you understand what’s relevant for Salesforce. This might include details on developing new solutions, such as Salesforce Lightning, or how to better structure a Salesforce detail page for optimal viewing for your sales teams. There are tracks for virtually every industry including Software, Banking and Retail and if you want to get more out of your Salesforce investment, plan on rolling up your sleeves and attending these sessions. Training is more detailed and more disciplined, but for the investment in time you usually walk away with an official Salesforce certification in hand, enabling you to make expert-level improvements within Salesforce for your company.

Cloud Expo – Dreamforce is the largest event for B2B vendors in the sales and marketing space. There will be staff on hand from every vendor from AdRoll to Zuora and every one in between and all are eagerly looking for an opportunity to talk to people interested in their products and services. Many companies tie new product launch announcements to Dreamforce and you should be certain to review the press feeds from key vendors and partners to see what’s worth talking about.

Peer to Peer Networking – while many people are at Dreamforce to learn about Salesforce or learn about exhibiting vendors, many of the real business happens off the floor, in quiet meeting spaces where people can connect to talk about potential partnerships, channel sales, co-marketing opportunities or product synergies. With so many people attending from sales, business development, marketing and product, it’s a natural opportunity to explore the waters and create some conversations that can drive your business.

For the first two types of events, Dreamforce’s website has some great functionality to help make it easier for people to attend the sessions they need and see the vendors they wish to see. Simply login to https://www.salesforce.com/dreamforce/DF16 and click Sessions to see the hundreds of programs available. Narrow down your choices by a theme (retail, or Lightning for example) and indicate on the program which sessions you want to join, or merely bookmark for further review.

For the Cloud Expo, you can click a vendor and find out their location, but there’s unfortunately no way to book an appointment with a vendor via the Dreamforce website. This places the burden more on you to try and schedule time with a vendor when it’s convenient for you. Dreamforce sessions are spread out over multiple properties, so while it may seem that it’d be easy to squeeze in a quick meeting, it really can be difficult to do so.

Which brings me to Peer to Peer Networking. Here at TimeTrade, we know a thing or two about networking and scheduling. We use our own tools to make it easy for people to meet with us. In fact, if you’re interested in striking up a conversation while at Dreamforce, just click HERE to find a time that works. That’s how easy it is with TimeTrade. No back and forth trying to juggle time and coordinate meeting places. And if you’re attending Dreamforce 2016, you need easy to use online scheduling software that’s updated in real time. TimeTrade users know that you’re always booking an available time since users’ times are always being updated via our Dynamic Availability feature. It’s the only way to stay current when you’re faced with potentially dozens of meetings each day with a crowd of enthusiastic business partners!

We hope that with this information, you feel organized to take on all the challenges of Dreamforce and remember to say hello, or better yet, schedule an appointment with us to talk!

Written by Steve Connolly

Steve has more than 20 years of product management experience, with the last several years working on products designed for B2B sales and marketers. Steve is responsible for the Scheduler product line within TimeTrade, which integrates into CRM solutions such as Dynamics and Salesforce. Prior to joining to TimeTrade, Steve was Director of Product at Lattice Engines.

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